Obama takes tougher stance on higher education

View full sizeAssociated Press filePresident Barack Obama greets members of the audience after speaking about his fiscal 2013 federal budget and his education initiatives last week at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Va.

WASHINGTON -- Access to college has been the driving
force in federal higher education policy for decades. But the Obama
administration is pushing a fundamental agenda shift that aggressively
brings a new question into the debate: What are people getting for their
money?

Students with loans are graduating on average with more
than $25,000 in debt. The federal government pours $140 billion annually
into federal grants and loans. Unemployment remains high, yet there are
projected shortages in many industries with some high-tech companies
already complaining about a lack of highly trained workers.

Meanwhile,
literacy among college students has declined in the last decade,
according to a commission convened during the George W. Bush
administration that said American higher education has become
"increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied, and unduly
expensive." About 40 percent of college students at four-year schools
aren't graduating, and in two-year programs, only about 40 percent of
students graduate or transfer, according to the policy and analysis
group College Measures.

College drop-outs are expensive, and not
just for the individual. About a fifth of full-time students who enroll
at a community college do not return for a second year, costing
taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to an
analysis released last fall by the American Institutes for Research.

There's
been a growing debate over whether post-secondary schools should be
more transparent about the cost of an education and the success of
graduates. President Barack Obama has weighed in with a strong "yes."

During
his State of the Union address, Obama put the higher education on
notice: "If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get
from taxpayers will go down," he said. "Higher education can't be a
luxury-- it's an economic imperative that every family in America should
be able to afford."

He wants to slightly reduce federal aid for
schools that don't control tuition costs and shift it to those that do.
He also has proposed an $8 billion program to train community college
students for high-growth industries that would provide financial
incentives to programs that ensured their trainees find work. Both
proposals need congressional approval.

At the same time, the
administration is developing both a "scorecard" for use in comparing
school statistics such as graduation rates as well as a "shopping sheet"
students would receive from schools they applied to with estimates of
how much debt they might graduate with and estimated future payments on
student loans.

American's higher education system has long been
the backbone of much of the nation's success, and there's no doubt that a
college degree is valuable. It's now projected that students with a
bachelor's degree will earn a million more dollars over their lifetime
than students with only a high school diploma, Education Secretary Arne
Duncan says.

But Obama's statement to Congress jolted the higher
education establishment, which believes that college isn't just to
create foot soldiers for industry and that the use of measured outcomes
would hurt the humanities, meaning fewer students will turn to
Shakespeare and instead study engineering, said Anthony Carnevale,
director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown
University. The community has already been reeling over an earlier
administration decision to require career college programs -- many of
which are at for-profit institutions -- to better prepare students for
"gainful employment" or risk losing federal aid.

"It's the notion
that the ...federal government will begin to say we want to know what
we're paying for and we want to make sure that people don't pay for
education programs that take them nowhere, especially if the program is
supposed to get them a job, we want it to get them a job, Carnevale
said.

Some fear that Obama might want to apply the "gainful
employment" standards to traditional four-year degree programs. Robert
Moran, director of federal relations at the American Association of
State Colleges and Universities, said reporting requires time and
resources, and it's even more difficult to gauge the success of a
graduate with an English degree than someone with a very specific career
certificate.

Duncan said in an interview he doesn't see a big
need to go in that direction now, although he does think it's important
to track factors such as graduation rates and tuition costs. He said he
tracked his graduates while serving as chief executive officer of the
Chicago Public Schools and noticed that some universities were
graduating them at rates of 75 percent or more, while others were
graduating them at a small fraction of that.

"Colleges aren't too
dissimilar to high schools. Some have done a great job building cultures
around completion and obtainment and some haven't," Duncan said.

Historically, policy conversations have centered on getting students into college. Duncan said graduating is just as important.

"To
be real clear, I think that's been the problem with federal policy in
the past is 100 percent has been focused on the front end on inputs,
that's clearly important, but that's the starting point. That gets you
in the game. The goal isn't to get to the game, the goal is to get to
the finish line," Duncan said.

Obama isn't the first president to
encourage dialogue on making higher education more affordable and
accountable. In addition to convening a commission to study higher
education in America, Bush's administration issued grants to states to
link transcript data with other records to better track the success of
graduates from public institutions. The Obama administration has
continued the program.

But Obama is taking the conversation to
another level. That doesn't mean, however, he's abandoning the issue of
accessibility. His administration has expanded the availability of Pell
grants, supported a tax credit for tuition costs and is attempting to
make it easier for some graduates to pay back loans.

Experts say
some of the challenges in higher education result from too many students
entering the doors without basic math and English skills. There's also
the question of how to measure how effective colleges are and whether
tuition increases are appropriate -- especially for public institutions
facing dramatic budget cuts.

Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the
former president of Mayland Community College, said the issues raised by
Obama are being addressed at the state and local level, where she said
they should be handled, and that many schools are coming up with
innovative ways to cut costs and to find ways to work with local
industry. As an example, she recalled developing, while a community
college president, a course in supervisory training after local industry
sought it.

"All of these things the president talks about can be
done at the local and state level, and are being done at the local and
state level," Foxx said. "It isn't the role of government to guarantee
somebody a good job after they graduate from college or community
college."

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., takes a different view.

"Right
now, the information about the potential of various careers, the track
records of colleges and the like is essentially strewn all over the
countryside," said Wyden, who authored a bill on making college costs
more transparent.

He added, "I think students and their parents
are now saying in addition to accessibility, we want to wring the
maximum value out of every dollar we're spending on education."

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